Monday, November 16, 2015

Meskhetian Turks in Ukraine Mark 71st Anniversary of Stalin’s Deportation of Their Nation

Paul
Goble

Staunton, November 16 – Muslims
living in Kyiv assembled in a mosque there to commemorate the 71st
anniversary of Stalin’s deportation of the Meskhetian Turks from their
ancestral homeland in what is now the Republic of Georgia and to call attention
to their continuing suffering.

Stalin deported
115,500 Meskhetians from the Georgian SSR on November 14, 1944, apparently to
get them out of the way of what he planned to be the Soviet Union’s invasion
route into Turkey.They were sent as
special settlers to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Only in 1956 were
any allowed to return.

At that time, part of the Mesketian
Turks settled in Kabardino-Balkaria and elsewhere in the North Caucasus. But
most remained in Uzbekistan. That changed after 1989 when there was a pogrom of
the Meskhetian Turks in the Fergana Valley who then fled from there to the
RSFSR, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.

Later, and still unable to return to
their ancestral lands, some of them resettled in Turkey. In February 2004, the
Russian and American governments, working with the International Migration
Organization, agreed to resettle the Meskhetian Turks from Krasnodar Kray in
some 60 cities of the US.

Approximately 5,000 were able to do
so before that program was stopped.

The total number of Meskhetian Turks
in the world is currently estimated at just over half a million.